No sooner did Alan Levine have a bone to pick with Flickr, TechSmith’s SnagIt! comes along and (as far as I can see innocently) makes available a plugin to upload screenshots to the Flickr service. I think this is wild, because while Flickr is playing hardball with Alan (and certainly SecondLife screenshots are much more “photographic”), a major software company is taking advantage of the Flickr API to supposedly violate the user agreement. Another crazy angle to this story is the screencast that TechSmith does has the demonstrator capture a photo with the SnagIt! software. Did they plan this because they know something? The consipiracy theorists are lining up as we speak!
Here’s another screenshot on the Flickr service that’s I “took” that I find interesting. It’s the screen you see to accept the “permissions” for the SnagIt plugin!
UPDATE: Eric Rice and 3pointD have assisted in getting out the word about Flickr’s controversial policy.
3 Responses
Fascinating. I can’t believe the Flickr policy will survive much longer. They might as well be requiring that all photos be taken with film cameras instead of digital ones.
Well, one won’t get banned for uploading non-photos, they just don’t show up in public searches. The reason for this (as I understand it) to hold the flickr brand together for being a _photo_ site. You can still use them, link to your photostream, use local searched, do a group with them, etc.
As they said 6 months ago they are working on maybe marking photos as non-photo (maybe to create some separate search for them) but for now they only have the NIPSA-tool for that.
(I also do understand that people might not want all kinds of non-photographic stuff when searching for something.)
I have a problem with that myself but that’s what I understand from the forums. So for now I need to decide whether to get pro or not or maybe search for some other hoster. Not sure what to do now as I also don’t know when (if ever) flickr might change it’s tools and thus it’s policy.
But regarding SnagIt I doubt that they are doing something bad here. People just need to be aware that their photos might not searchable (unless it’s just a minority of their photostream).
I’m from TechSmith and I wanted to chime in.
We’ve done everything in accordance with Flick’s policies and worked wtih them. If they change their policies, we’re happy to comply.
Drop me a line if you’d like to chat more.
Betsy